Posts Tagged With: Fear

I am fortunate in that I have much to be thankful for this year. But there have been years where … well, let’s not go there. Suffice to say that there are lots of hurting people out there and this time of year often seems to bring out just as many feelings of despair as it does joy. Sometimes life seems to just fling the crap at you and it can be hard to take.

Right now I have a friend who is hurting. Hurting loud enough to cry out to me. I confess, I’m scared. So if you’re the praying type, your prayers would be appreciated in a big way.

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I’ve often equated my ability to sense people’s feelings with a satellite dish. Almost like others send out vibes somehow and I’m able to detect them. This has caused a lot of anxious moments in my life, because while I may have been able to pick up the signal, as it were, I was never able to figure out what the source was. Eventually I realized that if I just sat back and let the feeling play out, the person involved would call me within a day or 2 and tell me what was going on. No one ever knew I was sensing their emotions, until I could say, “Oh it was YOU! I KNEW something was wrong somewhere!”

This is something I’ve always struggled with. I learned that talking about such things was not a good idea, because people start saying things like, “You need to be committed.” “You’re crazy.” “You should be in a nut house.” Keeping my mouth shut seemed the best course.

Now, without going into too much detail, I came to a point in my life where I was compelled to consider my thinking on the Biblical description of the spiritual gifts. I came to realize – and still believe – that such gifts are no longer in play for the church as a whole. (For those who are interested in such things, we can email and I’ll explain my position, Biblically. :) ) So, for all intents and purposes, I “turned off my dish,” for lack of a better description.

But, I missed something. While I maintain that the spiritual gifts are no longer in play for the church, I have come to believe that some of them are in play for Christians individually, specifically to nurture and enhance our relationship with Christ. So, the dish that I allowed to start rusting from disuse, has lately been getting that rust scraped off and some signals have started coming back in again. But with a twist. See, before I never knew who was going through something, only that someone was. Now it seems I’m sensing the who as well. A long-time friend has been on my mind the last few days, in a very strong way, and I knew I should get in touch with her but I had this to do and that to take care of … so I procrastinated.

I spoke with her today. She’s going in for surgery in a couple of days and asked me to pray for her. Oh, I’ll be praying, you betcha. I’ll be on my knees. Without going into private detail, let me just say an oncologist suggested she get in ASAP to check things out. So yeah, you could say I’m worried. If you’re the praying kind, I’d appreciate them on her behalf.

God seems to have a way of thunking me on the head, and this is one of those times. That stiff wire brush to scrape the rust can be a real bear sometimes.

Less than a week until the election. Time is zipping by, it seems. And taking me with it. Have you ever had the feeling like someone’s put an evil curse on you and you just can’t break it? Seems to be the story of our life. All we can do is endure, right? So endure I will. I have no choice. I have some Irish blood so it’s either endure, or drink myself to death, and since I’m not a huge fan of alcohol, I’m out of options. Make no mistake though, drunk or sober, we of Irish descent will sing about our hardships at 2 AM. And not necessarily in key! We must lament the hand that guides our fate! Loudly! Thank goodness for blogging because nobody wants to hear me sing! Yeah yeah, nobody wants to see me blogging either, I know! Beat you to the punch on that one! Ha!

Anyway, endurance. It’s pretty exhausting. But we do what we have to, right? We shoulder on, dust ourselves off, and keep going. Sometimes we weep along the way but mostly we just put our faces to the wind and press forward. And we never stop hoping, never stop striving, never stop yearning for home. We persevere. Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.

The other night, my Beloved Husband, during his evening-commute-phone-call, asked me if I wanted him to bring home some fast food. Oh yeah! Cooking isn’t my favorite past-time, and I like doing dishes even less. I think my son has neophobia when it comes to food – he hates pretty much everything – but Baby Daughter walks around asking, "Fries? Pop?" as though she’s an addict going through withdrawal and looking to make a score. We’ve told our son that if he will try 10 new foods, we’ll get him a game for the game system, so he agreed to try a hamburger since Daddy was bringing something home. I know, can you believe it? My almost 6 year old son has never had a hamburger happy meal. Chicken nuggets, yeah, but "no burger, no, not ever, I hate that, I don’t need to try it to know I hate it!" That’s what we usually hear. But he really wants a new game, so he agreed to a burger. Battle averted. Whew!

We helped Daddy bring the goodies in when he got home, and pulled out the TV trays so we could watch cartoons with the kids while we ate. Usually I can’t stand cartoons, but you know, Piggley Winks actually isn’t that bad!

Dinner was going along fine, and my son was even eating his burger with fairly normal bites instead of his usual 1/16" sized bites. Okay, I’m exaggerating. It’s more like 1/32". He acts like we give him poison. :::sigh::: I swear, it takes him an hour to eat a bowl of cereal or a "peanut butter and jelly sandwich with no jelly and no crust" sandwich. Anyway, dinner was moving along when it happened. The guest. It wasn’t a knock on the door, and it wasn’t the ring of a phone.

It was a spider that scurried across my TV tray right out from under my opened burger box.

I gasped and did my best to slide my tray sideways, out of the WAY MOVE SO I CAN GET OUT! My husband, ever my knight in shining armor, bolted to find the little sucker before he could hide. The kids sat there looking at us like we were doing some kind of weird parent dance, sans music. Wouldn’t you know it, the spider dropped to the coffee table – he knew we were after him! (I say we like I wasn’t all the way across the room) He scurried off the coffee table, across the floor and under the basket of CD’s under the TV. Well, my knight got him anyway. Neener!

So today, I’m making the bed. Last touch, grab the toss pillows off the floor and toss them back onto the bed. I straightened it just so, and saw him, another spider, against the patterned background of the quilt. Oh my God he’s HUGE! He sat there looking at me, pretending he was "blending" so I pretended he was "blending" too, and grabbed a handful of tissue. Ugh, it wasn’t enough! I got him, yeah, but I could feel his grotesque spider body through the tissue while I ran screaming to the trash can. :::feels shiver down my spine just writing about it::: I’m not normally a screamer, so I got the kids attention, who were then right in front of me while I was trying to get to the garbage. MOVE!! I just knew, KNEW if I didn’t make it fast enough he was going to crawl out of the gobs of tissue and eat me. Alive. And then go after my kids for dessert. I’m still giving the garbage can a wide berth.

I don’t like spiders, in case you couldn’t tell. I got a gardening magazine in the mail once that had a spider on the cover, and couldn’t bear to have it face up on the coffee table. When I was 4, I woke up to a spider in my room and sprayed it to death with air freshener, that being the only thing within reach. Once, one snuck up behind me while I was spray-painting something and guess what? Yep, stiff, sticky, dead, glossy white spider . I’ll use what I can as a weapon, but, if it’s out, my favorite is the vacuum. A 6 foot reach so I don’t have to even come near the little bastards. If there’s a spider on the wall, and it’s location is higher than my height, it automatically becomes taller than me. That’s when I go get the vacuum.

When I was in high school, my sweetheart got a pet tarantula and named it after me. I tried to be flattered, really I did, but it’s hard to feel flattered when you’ve had your worst nightmare named after you! (lol Did I want to hold it. Goodness, you were funny, C!) Guess who my son’s favorite superhero is? Spiderman EVERYWHERE! I just love it when he calls me "Spider-mom"! (Seriously, I do – it’s cute! But it does creep me out a little!)

I have this irrational notion that when Satan took 1/3 of the angels with him when he got kicked out of heaven, some of them decided to become spiders, demons incarnate, to harass people on the earth. Boogey boogey boogey BOO, evil is coming to get YOU! (I said irrational, I’m not that dumb!) And I have absolutely zero desire to overcome my fear. I live with it just fine, thank you very much. What I can’t live with, is spiders!

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Funny how memories sometimes pop into your head, unannounced and uninvited. But they do. And for some reason, gorilla masks popped into mine. None of my experiences with gorilla masks have been especially positive, and one has even been downright terrifying.

The first time I came into contact with such a mask, I was 17, and a guest at a birthday party. Namely, my father’s birthday party, and as a surprise for him, my step-monstermother flew me out to where they lived and had me jump out of a box to surprise my father. A while after that, one of the other guests had something delivered to the birthday boy by way of a guy in a gorilla mask. I don’t remember what he delivered, it was probably alcohol, but I do remember that he was invited to take off his mask and join the party. Ooh, he was a nice looking guy to my 17 year old eyes but I figured he was too old for me, what with that thick mustache he had. Turned out he was only 16! Funny, he thought I was too old for him, so when we found out how close in age we actually were, well, needless to say, there were a few sparks. We exchanged phone numbers and talked quite a bit, and I made it clear to him that I was just having fun since I didn’t live there and would be going back the state I did live in in the near future. Turned out his mother grew up just a scant block away from where I lived and you know what? That meant we were destined to be together. Destined, I tell ya! Since when did a few phone calls equal destiny? It got more uncomfortable when he invited me to attend a school play he was in, as his guest. I sat with his parents. Seemed like nice enough folks, and hey, I could talk to his mom about where she grew up. Things got decidedly uncomfortable for me when it came time for this young man’s song, and he decided to serenade me, in front of the entire school, in front of his parents – spotlight on! I used to like Sweet Gypsy Rose. After that, I asked the kid not to call me anymore, and subsequently started getting lots of crank phone calls not just from him, but from his friends too, who thought they were "defending his honor" somehow. Sheesh, I never meant to hurt the guy, I just didn’t want it to get as serious as it apparently was for him.

My next experience with a gorilla mask came when I was about 18 or so, and my mother and I moved to a new apartment. Being a friendly and curious spirit at the time, I made chit-chat with the movers. Honestly, I don’t even remember what I said but it was probably something stupid like, "Did you always want to be a moving man?" It was just small talk – you know, you just try to be polite to people and not act like you’re ignoring them. The following Monday after the move, I was on the phone with a girlfriend, when there came a knock at the door. I answered and was greeted by a guy in a gorilla mask, holding a dozen roses. I screamed and dropped the phone, because he said, "Boo!" He laughed, handed me the roses, and left. I could hear my friend screaming, "Are you okay?!?!" through the phone I’d dropped, and I told her what had happened when I picked it up again. "Is there a card? There has to be a card! No one just delivers roses without a card! What’s the card say?" she demanded. I found the card in question and read it to her. It was from one of the moving guys! And further, it said that unless he heard from me before-hand, he’d be over that afternoon so we could be together! Of all the freakin’ nerve! My friend was appalled. I was scared. It was more than presumptuous. So I had to call him, and after thanking him for the roses, I had to explain that I didn’t know where he got the idea, but it wasn’t anything mutual; I’d just been making small talk and please don’t come to my house. My friend was scared and suggested I leave the house just in case he decided to come by anyway. So I went to her house. I was pretty nervous for several days after that but he never contacted me again.

My last experience with gorilla masks came in my 30’s. I was working as a bank teller after my divorce. A couple of days before Halloween, some kids came in, in costume, one of them in a gorilla mask. "Oh, how cute!" I thought … until one of them pulled out a gun and screamed, "This isn’t a joke! Hands in the air! NOW!" They say that scenes from your life flash before your eyes when you think you’re about to die, but for me, it was scenes of my future without me that flashed before mine. I always thought I’d be sassy if I was ever in that kind of situation, but I wasn’t. I didn’t wet myself, thank God, but I did collapse in a heap on the floor when they left. I didn’t cry, but perhaps I was in shock. I just sat there, listening to the other people there ask where I was. I couldn’t talk, I could only sit there. Someone got me water and helped me up. I had to call the sitter and explain that I’d be late that night, but I couldn’t say why. The cops came, and I’m pretty sure some FBI guys did too. We were there for a long time, answering questions and trying to give descriptions of the robbers, their weapons, how they sounded, how they acted, stuff like that. The bank president came in, and with the cops we all watched the tape of the robbery. It lasted about a minute. Believe me, it felt much, much longer. When we were finally cleared to go, the bank president – who’d kept asking me all evening if I was okay because I looked sort of pale – said, "See you tomorrow!" Yeah, thanks for the trauma counseling, whopperhole. They sent me down to the main bank after that, since they’d closed the branch I had been in, except for drive-through. About 2 weeks after the robbery, some guys walked in, holding a bag, and I froze. Turned out they had a big bag of coins they wanted to exchange for bills. That’s when I learned that what I was experiencing – the nightmares, the sleepless nights, the jumpiness – had a name. I learned about post-traumatic-stress-disorder. Eventually I got over that. Eventually.

I hope my son never wants to go trick-or-treating as King Kong. Anything but that! Because I still hate gorilla masks. And I’m sure I always will.